Rackspace confirmed earlier rumors Tuesday by announcing that it will expand its cloud support offerings for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Inc.
Rackspace’s “Fanatical support for AWS” offering, which Rackspace offers to customers in the United States, and across all AWS regions (except China and the AWS GovCloud), is now available. This announcement comes as part of the AWS reInvent conference, which will take place in Las Vegas this week.
Rackspace’s 100 AWS-certified engineers will provide support, tooling, and automation to organizations under “Fanatical Services for AWS”. There are two levels to the service: the Navigator level is for organizations that want total control over their AWS environments and the Aviator level is for organizations that want to outsource all management to Rackspace.
Rackspace is also beta testing “Managed Security for AWS” and “Compliance Assistance for AWS”, which offer round-the-clock security support, compliance consulting services, and more.
Rackspace and AWS were first reported by The Wall Street Journal in September. They cited unnamed sources.
Rackspace announced this summer a similar agreement to Microsoft to support its Azure cloud platform. As Rackspace was once a rival in the public cloud space, Microsoft’s announcement was also met with surprise by many. Tuesday’s Rackspace agreement received a similar reception. This may be why this Rackspace blog post explaining the deal was written.
“We have a long tradition of providing the best customer service and expertise for the most advanced technologies. We help businesses harness the power of cloud computing without having to manage it themselves. We are experts in supporting platforms like OpenStack, Microsoft, and VMware. Rackspace President and CEO Taylor Rhodes stated that industry experts like Gartner have confirmed our success in leading managed cloud markets for these technologies. He also cited the endorsement of over 300,000 business customers.
Rhodes said that Rackspace has always sought out the most advanced technologies in the world and provided Fanatical Support and expertise, even if they were already supporting a ‘competing solution’.